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There were already signs that Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone app market might be a bit more lively than expected before Apple’s (AAPL) big patent win over Samsung (005930). Now, the threat of U.S. handset sales injunctions and possible new litigation against HTC (2498), Sony (SNE), LG (066570) and other Android vendors could give Windows Phone some extra oomph.
In a recent Vision Mobile study, 37% of the app developers polled were currently using Microsoft’s mobile platform. This was well below Android at 76% and iOS at 66%, but it already tops BlackBerry OS at 34%.
Implausibly, 57% of developers said they were planning to adopt Windows Phone in the future.
Windows Phone crossed the 100,000 app threshold in June 2012. The number lags far behind the iOS App Store, which now tops 700,000. But Windows Phone hit the 100,000 mark in 20 months – four months faster than Android and four months slower than iOS. That isn’t half bad.
Anecdotally, several app developers have recently indicate…

Block Websites from appearing in your Google Search Results
Google has been getting better at identifying and removing spam websites from their search results pages but sometimes not-so-useful sites do manage to slip through the Google filters. What can you do to prevent such sites from appearing in your Google results? →
Approach #1: Block Sites at the Browser Level
Google offers an easy-to-use Chrome add-on called Personal Blocklist that lets you block entire web domains from showing up in your Google search results. If you spot any irrelevant website in search results pages, just click the block link (screenshot below) and all pages from that website will be hidden from your Google results forever.
The Chrome add-on implements client-side filtering – the blocked websites
are still getting served in Google search results as before and the add-on
simply hides them on your screen using CSS.
A limitation with this approach is that it works only inside Google Chrome. That is, if you a…

With the Nokia World event just around the corner, reports of the brand’s upcoming smartphones appear to be trickling in. A handset that had been mention before, named Phi, has surfaced once more and this time noted tech blogger Eldar Murtazin reveals some information on the Nokia Windows Phone 8 device, a report by Obozrevatel.com states.The Russian blogger has revealed in a conversation with the website that this Windows Phone 8 device currently goes under the codename Phi and is made up of a similar unibody design that is presently found on the Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 devices from Nokia. The major point he mentioned was that it was thinner and larger in comparison to these existing handsets.
Eldar Murtazin says that the display of the handset will be 4.7-inches and commenting on the AMOLED display, he goes on to state, “The screen is very nice, with no points or complaints possible against it.” The blogger goes on to mention other features of this handset as well and states that i…

As blogger Eric Mack points out in his post today, taking pot shots at our friends to the north has practically become a national pastime, rivaling baseball -- or hockey, depending on which side of the border you’re on.
But Mack is not ready to count RIM out. In his blog titled “RIM's secret weapon is actually pretty cool,” Mack points out that the maker of BlackBerry smartphones and related software may still have a trick or two up its Canadian sleeve.
RIM’s upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system, though late, may still pack a wallop, Mack suggests, by virtue of its built-in abilities to talk securely to embedded systems in cars, and beyond. The capabilities are related to RIM’s acquisition of the embedded OS called QNX, which will form the basis of the BB 10 system.
In an editorial published Tuesday in Canada's Globe and Mail, RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins insisted that even though it won’t ship until 2013 now, the new OS is worth waiting for. Unlike existing mobile OS plat…

Nokia is set to announce two Windows Phone 8 smartphones at its September 5 event in New York. The Verge is reporting the two smartphones will be the Arrow and Phi (internal codenames) and will be branded under Nokia’s Lumia range.
The Phi is expected to be the
higher-end device, which could be the one that surfaced a few weeks ago.
It is expected to be thinner than the Lumia 900 and sport a 4.7-inch
display. Microsoft and Nokia are said to unveil the final design on
September 5 but it is likely to have the typical polycarbonate casing
that is similar to the Lumia 900 and Lumia 800.
The Arrow will be a mid-end smartphone but little is known about it.

Let’s admit it, Microsoft is gearing up for one hell of a year. The
company has adopted a new design language, formerly known as Metro,
through out its entire product line up. It is only apt that now this
very design language is trickling down to the company’s official logo.
This change comes 25 years after Microsoft had unveiled it previous
logo. The new logo integrates a multi-color Windows logo as well, that
also highlights the fact that Windows is the flagship product for
Microsoft.

Clearly this is the biggest year in the history of Microsoft and we are
seeing an unprecedented level of integration in its entire product line.
All products including Windows, Windows Phone, Office, Outlook.com,
Skydrive, Xbox and Windows Azure are in for a revamp and the adoption
of the new ‘Metro’ like logo is seem like the final culmination of this
integration.

Nasa's Curiosity rover has zapped its
first Martian rock.
The robot fired its ChemCam laser at a tennis-ball-sized stone lying about
2.5m away on the ground.
The brief but powerful burst of light from the instrument vapourised the
surface of the rock, revealing details of its basic chemistry.
This was just target practice for ChemCam, proving it is ready to begin the
serious business of investigating the geology of the Red Planet.
It is part of a suite of instruments on the one-tonne robot, which landed two
weeks ago in a deep equatorial depression known as Gale Crater.
Over the course of one Martian year, Curiosity will try to determine
whether past environments at its touchdown location could ever have supported
life.
The US-French ChemCam instrument will be a critical part of that
investigation, helping to select the most interesting objects for study.
The inaugural target of the laser was a 7cm-wide rock dubbed "Coronation"
(previously N165).
It had …

QR
or Quick Response codes are handy little barcodesthat can store data
like numbers, websites and text. They've been used in many boring ways
before, but now ET show you some offbeat and fun ways to use them to
your advantage.

Reminders for friends/familyDo
people complain about your handwriting? Instead of leaving handwritten
reminders or notes, you can generate a QR code with a reminder message
that you want to convey to friends or family. Create your QR code using
one of the listed services in the box, print it and place it somewhere
with high visibility (like the fridge). Anyone can quickly scan the QR
code using a phone or tablet to view the reminder on their screen.

Use them as clues for a treasure huntA
treasure hunt normally has a series of clues which leads to a final
treasure — in this case, you can replace the text clues with printed QR
codes to make a 'geeky' treasure hunt. To make things harder as the hunt
progresses, the initial clues can be sim…

A new threat targeting infrastructure
in the energy industry has been uncovered by security specialists.
The attack, known as Shamoon, is said to have hit "at least one organisation"
in the sector.
Shamoon is capable of wiping files and rendering several computers on a
network unusable.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia's national oil company said an attack had led to
its own network being taken offline.
Although Saudi Aramco did not link the issue to the Shamoon threat, it did
confirm that the company had suffered a "sudden disruption".
In a
statement, the company said it had now isolated its computer networks as a
precautionary measure.
The disruptions were "suspected to be the result of a virus that had infected
personal workstations without affecting the primary components of the network",
a statement read.
It said the attack had had "no impact whatsoever" on production
operations.Rendered unusable
On Thursday, security firms …

The 2012 London Olympics have come and gone. The celebrations were
beautiful and we cheered for our teams and our favourite athletes and
now it is time to look away from the television screens and then weep at
our growing pot bellies . And the tech-savvy crowd generally does not
have the perception of being too fit. But not to worry, advances in
personal technologycan help you get that ripped bodies that you've
always wanted, or try to anyway.Here we look at some of the mobile apps that can help you in your personal fitness regimens.

Nike+ running appNike has
understood its market. They're not just about making shoes anymore.
They want to offer fitness. And they have developed an entire range of
products to make technology work for you. The Nike+ running app, out of
all the running apps in the market, seems to be the most popular, and it
is available for iOS and Android devices.

According to the
Google Play store, the app has been downloaded over million times in th…

In Dubai next month, 50-year-old telecom entrepreneurSunil
Tagare will pitch a new cable project — his third — to telecom carriers
from around the world.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, Tagare,
then with US telecom company Nynex (now Verizon), helped implement the
giant 28,000-km FLAG cable system which was the first privately financed
submarine optic fibre cable network. FLAG, now owned by Anil Ambani's
RCom, remains one of the cornerstones of the global telecom network,
moving phone calls and internet pages across the world, from Singapore
to Europe to the US.

It's too early to talk of success or failure
for Tagare's latest project — and even if it does take off, any new
cable venture will only add to a decade-long global oversupply of
bandwidth. Prices of bandwidth in the past five years, in a key market
like London, have fallen by an average of 31% every year, according
toTelegeography, a telecoms consultancy.

A
new computer virus, dubbed Gauss, has been discovered in the Middle
East. Researchers say can it steal banking credentials and hijack login
information for social networking sites, email and instant messaging
accounts.

Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab said Gauss is the
work of the same "factory" or "factories" that built the Stuxnet worm,
which attacked Iran's nuclear program. Here are some key facts about
Gauss, according to Kaspersky Lab.

What is its purpose? Gauss
is a surveillance tool. It steals credentials for hacking online
banking systems, social networking sites and email accounts; it also
gathers information about infected PCs, including web browsing history,
system passwords and the contents of disk drives.

Can it do anything else? There
is a mysterious module, known as Godel, that copies malicious code onto
USB drives when they are plugged into infected PCs. Godel's purpose is
unknown because some of its code is compressed and scr…

Social media has changed the way people communicate. Maybe older
people complain that it has replaced the good ol’ fashion “tea party”,
so to speak. Most people these days own a smartphone, and if they don’t,
then they at least have access to the internet. Because of this, the
simplest way to contact a friend is to ping them on one of the many
social networks they belong to.
I remember my introduction to social media. I was about 12 or 13, and
America Online was still the primary method used to connect to the
internet. I would spend hours playing on bolt.com,
a social networking site started by a community of teenagers. It was
through that site that I met my first online crush (whom I have never
forgotten to this day). Unfortunately, the site only lasted for 13 years
before shutting down.
It is not uncommon for such a site to loose their standing on the
internet. There is always something bigger and better that comes along.
In the case of bolt, the next big thing to ro…

The Google I/O 2012 conference brought us a whole bunch of new stuff from the software giant. But who can argue with the fact that the service that made it this massive company is also the one thing we're all so dependent on - Google’s search engine. It’s quick, it gives you the information you need and there’s a huge environment built around the search engine that we’ve all gotten so used to. However, there are some downsides that aren’t very apparent, but they exist. Google’s search engine uses a certain algorithm and there’s a system which prioritizes sites based on how reputed a site is, along with a bunch of other variables that ensue in the background.
Now, what if you were looking for information on photography tips for a particular camera, say a new Nikon D3200 DSLR, you might find reviews and information about the D3200 on the popular sites, because it’s a popular product, not you might not necessarily find the best techniques and details you’re looking for. That qualit…